‘The Bear’ Star Ayo Edebiri Seeks Second Emmy Trophy in a New Category
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1995-present
Latest News: Ayo Edebiri Seeks Lead Actress Emmy Award
As chef Sydney’s role on The Bear continues to grow, actor Ayo Edebiri finds herself in the spotlight in new ways. On September 15, at the 2024 Emmy Awards, she’s competing in a new category.
Edebiri, 28, won her first Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in January for her performance on the kitchen comedy-drama also starring Jeremy Allen White. This time around, she’s nominated in the Lead Actress category and faces fellow nominees Selena Gomez, Quinta Brunson, Maya Rudolph, Jean Smart, and Kristen Wiig.
While The Bear received 23 nominations total—the most ever for a comedy series—Edebiri has maintained the accolades aren’t what truly matter to the cast and crew. “Getting to make this work is the gift and also, like, getting to have people really feel impacted by it and, you know, moved by it. That’s the gift on top of the gift,” she said in June.
Who Is Ayo Edebiri?
Actor Ayo Edebiri is best known for her TV role as sous chef Sydney Adamu on The Bear, for which she won an Emmy and Golden Globe Award in 2024. Prior to this breakout role, Edebiri performed as a standup comedian and worked as a writer for multiple television shows, including Dickinson and the animated comedy Big Mouth. Edebiri received her first major acting opportunity in the latter as the voice of Missy. More recently, she starred in the 2023 teen comedy movie Bottoms and voiced Envy in 2024’s animated hit Inside Out 2.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Ayo Edebiri
BORN: October 3, 1995
BIRTHPLACE: Boston, Massachusetts
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Libra
Early Life and Education
Ayo Edebiri was born October 3, 1995, in Boston and grew up in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood. Both of her parents are immigrants to the United States, with her father originally from Nigeria and her mother from Barbados.
An only child, Edebiri was greatly influenced by religion while growing up. She attended a Pentecostal church with her family at least twice a week and told The New Yorker in June 2023 that the Bible helped spark her interest in storytelling. She frequently wrote stories in her journal and, by the time she was around 8 or 9 years old, drafted a fantasy novel about an orphan girl.
She then developed a passion for visual storytelling after watching Westerns with her father, including A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), both starring Clint Eastwood. But in terms of her future, “I didn’t really think of acting as a job that I could do. I wanted a real job that would make me money,” she said. Still, she fulfilled her creative instincts by performing improv during middle and high school.
Edebiri attended predominantly white institutions and received her high school education at Boston Latin School, established in 1635 and now the oldest public school in the United States. Her parents encouraged her to study to become a teacher, and she enrolled at New York University. After two years, she began to reconsider her future. She switched her major to dramatic writing and began to perform stand-up comedy at the encouragement of her friend Rachel Sennott. By the time Edebiri graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2017, she was determined to pursue a comedy career.
Early Comedy and TV Writing Career
After graduation, Edebiri remained in New York City and continued to perform stand-up routines. She signed up for open mics and other gigs across Manhattan and Brooklyn, sometimes performing multiple times in one day.
Edebiri told Forbes in 2019 that she gave herself two years—until her undergraduate teaching degree expired—to try to make it in comedy or else she would return to school and study for her master’s degree. “I gave myself a little challenge and it turned out okay,” she said, as that same year she had a set featured on Comedy Central’s Up Next series.
Off the recognition from her stand-up, Edebiri began to attract interest for her writing ability. She soon moved to Los Angeles and began writing for television shows such as the NBC sitcom Sunnyside, the FX comedy What We Do in the Shadows, and the Apple TV+ comedy-drama Dickinson, starring Hailee Steinfeld as a fictional version of Emily Dickinson.
At one of her comedy sets, Edebiri had also drawn the attention of comedian Nick Kroll, co-creator of the Netflix animated series Big Mouth, an adult coming-of-age comedy about teenagers navigating puberty. “She was, like, 24, and already so in control of her voice,” Kroll told The New Yorker, and so he invited Edebiri to interview for a seat in the show’s writing room. Edebiri got the job and began writing for the show’s fifth season when the opportunity for an expanded role opened up.
TV Shows
During the fourth season of Big Mouth in 2020, Edebiri began voicing the character Missy in her first major acting role. She took over the part from comedian Jenny Slate, who announced in June 2020 she would no longer voice Missy because the character was biracial yet she is white. “Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people,” Slate wrote in an Instagram post. The show’s creators likewise apologized for their initial casting decision.
Show co-creator Andrew Goldberg told Variety that Edebiri, who auditioned and had multiple callbacks with the production team, was ultimately chosen because she brought “so much of herself” to the role and identified with the character. “I was definitely a very uncomfortable child, so I think the show speaks to that and a lot of those feelings, which still resonate with me as an adult,” Edebiri said in August 2020. Unfortunately, according to The New Yorker, the casting decision made the actor and her parents the subject of harassment—leading Edebiri to remove information about her family from the internet.
Despite this, she has voiced Missy through 32 episodes of the show and is expected to reprise the role for Big Mouth’s eighth and final season in 2025. A release date hasn’t been announced.
With the success of Big Mouth, Edebiri began regularly appearing on camera as well. She starred with her friend Rachel Sennott in the Comedy Central sketch miniseries Ayo and Rachel are Single in 2020, playing fictionalized versions of themselves. She also played Hattie on six episodes of Dickinson in 2021 and had appearances in the anthology series The Premise (2021) and the HBO talk show Pause with Sam Jay (2022). Edebiri was clearly on the rise and, by this point, eyed the role that would launch her into stardom.
Emmy and Golden Globe for The Bear
In 2021, Edebiri received an audition notice for The Bear, a new comedy-drama series about a gifted chef (played by Jeremy Allen White) who returns to Chicago to take over a failing sandwich shop previously run by his late brother. Series creator Christopher Storer, who had eaten lunch with Edebiri in 2019 and promised they would work together someday, eventually offered her the role of aspiring sous chef Sydney Adamu.
To prepare, Edebiri drew on her past experience working in New York City restaurants in the early days of her comedy career. According to People, she also trained with White at the Institute of Culinary Education in Pasadena, California, and worked in the kitchens of multiple Michelin-star restaurants. “It needs to look real. And if we’re practicing it, you might as well make it taste real,” she told The New York Times.
The Bear was an immediate hit, with critics praising its writing and acting. The show won Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy at the 2024 Golden Globes and received 10 Emmys out of 13 total nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series. Edebiri has received plenty of accolades herself, winning Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Musical or Comedy TV Series at the Globes. Days later, she was named Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the 75th Emmy Awards, delayed from 2023 because of writers and actors strikes.
Edebiri is again nominated at the upcoming 2024 Emmy Awards but this time in the category of Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. For the show’s third season, which premiered in June 2024, the actor also directed an episode. Multiple media outlets have reported The Bear was renewed for Season 4, though there hasn’t been an official announcement from FX.
Since The Bear began, Edebiri has appeared on a variety of popular TV shows, including the Netflix anthology series Black Mirror, the Max animated comedy Clone High, and the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary. She also hosted Saturday Night Live in February 2024.
Movies: Bottoms, Inside Out 2, and Upcoming Films
Buoyed by her success on TV, Edebiri appeared in a number of major movie releases in 2023, including voice roles in the animated superhero films Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, as well as a part in the mockumentary Theater Camp. She and Rachel Sennott teamed up once again for the 2023 comedy movie Bottoms, in which they play queer high school students who organize a fight club in order to lose their virginity to popular cheerleaders.
In June 2024, Edebiri lent her voice to emotion Envy in the animated sequel Inside Out 2, which grossed more than $724 million within its first week and a half in theaters and eventually surpassed Frozen 2 as the highest-grossing animated movie of all-time globally. This September, she co-stars in a sci-fi comedy about time travel, Omni Loop, with Mary-Louise Parker.
Two of the actor’s next roles introduce her to new genres. She is starring in a horror movie called Opus and is part of the cast for the thriller After the Hunt, which began production in July 2024. The latter movie also stars Julia Roberts and Chlo? Sevigny. Elsewhere, Edebiri filmed Ella McCay—a political comedy starring Emma Mackey, Woody Harrelson, and Jamie Lee Curtis—in the first half of 2024. Her busy year might account for the scheduling conflict that led her to drop out of the Marvel Studios movie Thunderbolts*, currently scheduled for a May 2025 release.
Personal Life
Edebiri has shared little detail about her personal life and dating history. She identified as queer in a September 2023 interview with Refinery29.
The actor is more open about her furry companion, a rescued chihuahua mix named Gromit. She explained to People in August 2023 she often brings the dog with her to writers’ rooms and production sets. “I’ve been lucky enough to be on sets where they know Gromit, and they love Gromit, like The Bear,” she said, adding the pooch often hangs out with showrunner Christopher Storer.
Quotes
Humor is a weapon—a powerful one. And it’s also a balm, a salve that you can use to heal and even to start conversations.
I want to try to help in whatever capacity I can to make the future that I want to live in. I don’t know totally what that looks like, but I’m also okay with not knowing as long as I keep pushing, and the people around me are pushing, too.
I like working, because I like my job, so that part is great. And if it means that people are responding to the work, then I have truly, truly, truly zero complaints. It’s, like, a dream come true.
Oh my God—all of my agents’ and managers’ assistants! To the people who answer my emails, y’all are real ones. Thank you for answering my crazy, crazy emails.
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